LONDON: Pakistan’s Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups, including LeT, and will not abandon them for any amount of US money, the American envoy to Islamabad wrote in a secret review in 2009, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.
According to a report in the Guardian today, the review said that Pakistan had received more than USD 16 billion in American aid since 2001, but “there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance… as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups”, Anne Patterson wrote in the review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy in September 2009.
Secret cables, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, show that US diplomats and spies believe Pakistan army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continue to quietly back four militant groups — the Afghan Taliban, its allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks on the western Afghan frontier, and LeT on the eastern border with India.
Some ISI officials “continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations, in particular the Taliban, LeT and other extremist organizations,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009.
Resolving the 63-year-old Kashmir conflict “would dramatically improve the situation”, Patterson said.
Patterson also underpinned the need for the US to reassess India’s role in Afghanistan and the growing Indo-US relationship.
“We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies towards India, including the growing military relationship through sizeable conventional arms sales, as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups while reinforcing doubts about US intentions,” she said.
The latest cache of WikiLeaks documents also lay bare the deep concern of the US over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the fact that Islamabad is producing them at a “faster rate than any other country in the world”.
Painting a damning picture of its “ally”, American officials expressed serious misgivings about the possibility of elements within the Pakistan establishment smuggling enough material out to eventually make a rogue nuclear weapon.
The US diplomatic cables also revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars in American military aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for the desired purpose, but diverted to the government’s coffers, the paper said.
According to The Guardian, Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani said the money, including USD 26 million for barbed wire and USD 70 million to defend against non-existent Taliban warplanes, had been diverted into the Islamabad government’s coffers. US payments for the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal belt have reportedly exceeded USD 7.5 billion since 2002.
In December 2007 US diplomats reported multiple instances where “funds have been diverted and reimbursed claims figures have been seriously inflated”.
When the payments slowed in January 2009 Kayani spoke candidly about the matter with General David Petraeus, a cable reported.
Most of the military funds had been diverted to the federal government, he said.
The British daily also reported that Kayani had been “utterly frank” about the consequences of a pro-India government coming to power in Kabul, according to a 2009 briefing in advance of his visit to Washington.
“The Pakistani establishment will dramatically increase support for Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which they see as an important counterweight,” the US cables said.
Alarmed by the links with Haqqani, whose fighters kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, and fearful that policy towards LeT could trigger nuclear war with India, US officials have urged Kayani to change course.
“The biggest single message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said one dispatch.
In a March 2009 briefing to FBI director Robert Mueller, the embassy noted that ISI chief General Shuja Pasha, “continues to profess a determination to end ISI’s overt and tacit support for proxy forces”.
The cables, The Guardian said, betray much American frustration and anger at alleged Pakistani duplicity.
“Engagement with the Pakistani military has been frustrating,” one dispatch said.
“Transparency is often nonexistent. Offers of assistance go unanswered or are overruled at headquarters, even as Pakistan’s maintenance and training are inadequate.”
US Vice-President Joe Biden described relations with Pakistan as “transactional” and “based on mutual distrust”.
The cables also contain warnings that Pakistan is rapidly building its nuclear stockpile despite the country’s growing instability and “pending economic catastrophe”.
Mariot Leslie, a senior British Foreign Office official, told US diplomats in September 2009: “The UK has deep concerns about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,” according to one cable classified “secret/noforn (no foreign nationals)”.
Seven months earlier, the US ambassador to Islamabad, Patterson, cabled to Washington: “Our major concern is not having an Islamic militant steal an entire weapon but rather the chance someone working in government of Pakistan facilities could gradually smuggle enough material out to eventually make a weapon”.
-PTI
